Upcoming Events

Thursday, July 25, 2013
10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM ET

In most data centers, DCIM rests on a shaky foundation of manual record keeping and scattered documentation. OpManager replaces data center documentation with a single repository for data, QRCodes for asset tracking, accurate 3D mapping of asset locations, and a configuration management database (CMDB). In this webcast, sponsored by ManageEngine, you will see how a real-world datacenter mapping stored in racktables gets imported into OpManager, which then provides a 3D visualization of where assets actually are. You'll also see how the QR Code generator helps you make the link between real assets and the monitoring world, and how the layered CMDB provides a single point of view for all your configuration data.

Thursday, August 8, 2013
11:00 AM PT / 2:00 PM ET

This webinar will help attendees understand the overall concept of SDN and its benefits, describe the different conceptual approaches to SDN, and examine the various technologies, both proprietary and open source, that are emerging. It will also help users decide whether SDN makes sense in their environment, and outline the first steps IT can take for testing SDN technologies.

Cloud Data Centers: Power Savings or Power Drain?

Posted by
Scott M. Fulton III
February 07, 2014

In a six-year span, one major laboratory has been the principal source of two contradictory reports on the power consumption of cloud data centers. The most recent report concludes that moving to the cloud saves energy, yet close inspection of the data reveals that virtualization -- not the use of the technology in the cloud -- is behind power reduction.

In 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency warned Congress that the power draw from cloud data centers appeared to be doubling every five years. At that rate, cloud data centers would be adding more stress to the nation's power grid than new citizens being added to the population.

The Cloud Energy and Emissions Research (CLEER) Model, funded in part by Google and introduced by LBNL in its June report, used survey data submitted by U.S. businesses to estimate significant power savings achievable through SaaS. Using this model, researchers extrapolated the following: If all U.S. businesses were to shift their critical business applications to cloud service providers, enough energy savings would be attained each year to power the entire city of Los Angeles.

Obviously, that's a somewhat different picture than the power precipice painted by the EPA, using data supplied in 2007 by the very same Berkeley Lab. Dale Sartor, who leads LBNL's Building Technologies Applications Team, told Network Computing data suggests the dire predictions advanced by the EPA did not pan out after all. Though LBNL's final word on the subject has yet to be published, totals for annual data center electricity use in 2011 appear closer to the low end of the 2007 forecast at 82 billion kilowatt-hours per year, rather than 122 B kWh/year.

The declining economy in the latter half of the prior decade had a significant impact, Sartor said. And although power usage by data centers is continuing to rise, he explained, the computational level of processors improves at a greater rate.

The CLEER Model (with which Sartor's team was not involved) is open to public experiments on the lab's website. IT professionals can key in their own data center specifications and energy use parameters, and see reasonable estimates of how much energy savings they can expect for themselves. LBNL principal investigator Dr. Lavanya Ramakrishnan told Network Computing these estimates are based on survey data submitted by data center administrators, not through direct observations made by LBNL researchers.

"Our results indicate substantial primary energy savings if U.S. businesses shift common software applications to the cloud," the CLEER case study report states. Yet where would these savings come from? The input data for the CLEER model comes solely from surveys, said Dr. Ramakrishnan, and it's impossible to drill down into specifics.

Using virtualization is what provides the savings, not the cloud model itself, postulated Sartor.

"In a typical cloud data center, you have virtualized servers," he said. "There's no reason why an enterprise data center can't adopt the same technologies that the cloud providers have. You basically virtualize your servers, and offer data center services rather than racks."

"That's the potential of [almost] 90 percent savings moving to the cloud," he added. "But you could have gotten exactly the same savings moving to a virtualized environment at your own data center."

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